Dare To Wash Your Hands

Change is not always an easy transition to make, but when truth becomes even more and more apparent, it has to happen.

In the mid-1800’s there was a man by the name of Ignaz Phillip Semmelweis who unbeknownst at the time was about attempt change. He witnesses a close friend cut his finger while performing an autopsy and soon thereafter dies of symptoms similar to puerperal fever, which is usually a result of an infection following childbirth towards the mother. This stirs some notions and ideas in Semmelweis.

He has already been struggling with the fact that the death rate for new mothers in the hospital that he works at has a death rate of near 15% while a nearby obstetric hospital, run by midwives, would have a death rate of near 2%. The incident with his friend allows him to recognize that their students were actively moving between the dissection room and the delivery rooms without washing their hands. He attempts to instill a new policy. Wash your hands. When they made the change, their hospital statistics dropped to 2% as well. Saving lives through prevention.

The policy is far too radical for the doctors of that era and Semmelweis, despite the statistics in his hospital, receives egregious review to his attempts to publish papers and books on the benefits this new procedure. It doesn’t take long and Semmelweis finds himself committed to a mental institution, where he dies dies shortly thereafter...of a cut to his finger.

When you wash your hands, remember Semmelweis, and his attempts to make something that is obvious to us now, a standard of care.

1895. It’s 30 years after Semmelweis’ death and D.D. Palmer delivers the first chiropractic adjustment. Today, over a hundred years later, chiropractic is still considered alternative and held under speculation by some insurance companies and medical doctors alike. It is different than what they know. And it is saving lives through prevention.

Change is not always an easy transition to make, but when truth becomes even more and more apparent, it has to happen.